San Francisco and Seattle. At the OMMA Gaming Conference in San Francisco yesterday, Alex St. John, CEO of Wild Tangent, opened up the day's discussion by making the bold statement that the game console is dead. At Casual Connect in Seattle this morning, Trip Hawkins, CEO, Digital Chocolate and founder of Electronic Arts, said that the iPhone and new touch-screen displays have made the mobile medium into one of the most interesting areas for the gaming industry today. Paul Thelen, Founder & CEO, Big Fish Games, gave a more balanced overview of the state of the industry. He said that the gaming industry is actually growing in a number of different categories and on multiple platforms at once. In fact, Thelen has identified 2,380 distinct areas in which a gaming company could possibly focus.

St. John's statement about the death of the console might seem self-serving, considering the PC-focus of his company Wild Tangent, but he made a solid argument for his position. My take on St. John's keynote is that he believes that the gaming industry will head in the same direction as the music industry and drop all forms of DRM and console-specific properties as it ultimately heads toward a one standard browser-based jukebox-in-the-sky system for playing games. While he might be right in the long run, this won't happen over night, which brings us to Thelen's presentation.

Paul Thelen is not joking when he says that the gaming industry have grown increasingly complex. The number of game categories, platforms and business models out there these days is mind-boggling. His advice to the audience of gaming industry insiders gathered in Seattle is to be specialists, not generalists. For example, all gaming companies need not produce social games or games for social media.
"Social gaming is big, but we should not forget that there are a lot of people, especially older female gamers, that prefer to game alone," he said.

One area of focus for gaming companies today is undeniably mobile games. So far, this segment of the gaming market has been slow to take off, but Digital Chocolate's Trip Hawkins believes things are now finally about to change. He told the audience at Casual Connect that he thinks that the success of the iPhone is transforming the way that people think about the cell phone. Not only are three of the most popular iPhone apps games, but Hawkins believes that the touch-screen displays on new cell phones will revolutionize the user-experience in the same way as the mouse did for the PC.
"Personally I think that what Apple has done to the mobile phone market with the iPhone is a bigger deal than what they did to the PC market," he said.

Joakim Baage

Image by Matt Brett